The long, lonely revolutionary struggle is over for William Lee Brent, a former Black Panther who hijacked an airplane to Cuba in 1969 to avoid trial for shooting two San Francisco police officers.

Mr. Brent, who spent 37 years in exile on the communist island and chronicled his troubled life in a 1996 book, died at his home in Havana on Nov. 4 of bronchial pneumonia, his sister, Elouise Rawlins of Oakland, told the Associated Press. He was 75.

One of the most controversial members of the radical black-power movement of the 1960s, Mr. Brent never expressed any regret for the spectacular hijacking, but admitted 10 years ago that he missed "the body language" of the American black community.

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Although he lived a privileged life by Cuban standards, he remained until the end a man without a home, never becoming a Cuban citizen.

Born in 1930, in Franklin, La., he and his family moved to Oakland when he was 13, following in the footsteps of many Southern black families who came to the Bay Area during and after World War II.

His autobiography told how he was selling drugs and committing petty crimes by junior high school. He enlisted in the Army by using a fake birth certificate when he was 17, but even that effort failed when he was discharged after only eight months.

He served time in juvenile hall for stealing a bicycle. Then, in 1955, he was convicted of armed robbery and auto theft, and spent seven years in San Quentin State Prison.

After he was released in 1962, "I promised myself I'd die in the gutter before I would ever go back to prison," he wrote in his book, "Long Time Gone: A Black Panther's True-Life Story of His Hijacking and Twenty-Five Years in Cuba."

Mr. Brent began spending time at the library reading Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle's tales of Sherlock Holmes. In 1968, he attended a Black Panther rally in Oakland and joined the party. He became part of the inner circle of the radical group, known for its rejection of the nonviolent protest movement led by Martin Luther King Jr.

The Black Panthers, founded in Oakland in 1966 by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, espoused violent struggle against the white establishment and an end to police brutality in the black community. They carried guns and patrolled the streets of Oakland. The Black Panthers also sponsored social services for the community, including breakfast and tutoring programs for children, free medical clinics and clothing distribution.

As spokesman and bodyguard for Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, Mr. Brent was near the center of it all, but trouble, apparently fueled by drugs, was never far away.

In November 1968, he and two accomplices in a van marked "Black Panther Black Community News Service" robbed a gas station in San Francisco's Bayview district of $80. Police caught up to them on Seventh Street near the Hall of Justice, prompting a shootout, according to his book and news accounts. One of the officers, Lt. Dermott Creedon, was critically wounded. When Mr. Brent was arrested and identified as the triggerman, Cleaver kicked him out of the revolutionary group, citing "banditry."

The hijacking occurred when he was out on bail awaiting trial.

Mr. Brent boarded a TWA flight from Oakland to New York on June 17, 1969, wearing a suit and tie. Somewhere over Nevada, he walked into the cockpit and held a .38-caliber revolver to the pilot's head, ordering him to take him and the 78 other passengers on board to Havana.

It was the 28th hijacking of the year.

Mr. Brent told in his book how he expected to be greeted in the communist nation as a hero, but was instead held in a Cuban jail for 22 months. He was eventually allowed to stay, cutting sugarcane, working in a soap factory and laboring on a hog farm. He married Jane McManus, an American travel writer living in Cuba, and in 1981 got a degree in Spanish literature from the University of Havana.

He lived in a spacious apartment overlooking the Almendares River, worked as a disc jockey on Cuban radio and taught high school English, but grew tired of the island nation and lonely for people he had left behind.

"I am an American, an African American, a black man," he said in the 1996 interview with the Associated Press. "I miss my people, the struggle, the body language. The black community in Cuba is very different."

Still, he was unwilling to spend the rest of his life in prison for aircraft piracy and kidnapping. After his wife died last year, he reportedly spent long hours in his apartment listening to his collection of American jazz, the only real connection he still had to his homeland.